


open secret

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: cliche_bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-24
Updated: 2009-08-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:25:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On any given day, the desk Rodney has commandeered to use while he's researching is covered with...</p>
            </blockquote>





	open secret

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the peerless dogeared for looking this over! Written as a small gift for sheafrotherdon, who accomplishes great things. \o/ For cliche_bingo for the prompt 'Secret admirers.'

On any given day, the desk Rodney has commandeered to use while he's researching is covered with: two laptops; the cannibalised insides of a third; a half-full bottle of Advil; a soldering iron; a stack of external hard drives; fifteen green Sharpie pens; four mechanical pencils; a pen holder which contains none of the fifteen green Sharpie pens or the four mechanical pencils; a single sock; several different screwdrivers; the shredded foil wrappers of countless Cadbury's Creme Eggs; a life-signs detector; three mugs of cold coffee dregs; abandoned paperwork; paperwork that's never been started; the browning core of an Athosian _ulúu_, which is something like a tarter apple; a stapler, slightly dented from the time Rodney threw it at a wall; and over it all, a sprinkling of Post-It notes covered with Rodney's vaguely legible scrawl.

On this particular day—a Wednesday, one day after their biannual dial-in with the SGC, six days after the mission to Zikurna which still has Rodney sitting gingerly on a padded cushion, and forty-five years to the day after Joyce McKay had yelled at her husband that she needed to get to the hospital _now_—these items are all present and correct and, in some cases, slightly mouldering when Rodney, Radek and Miko stagger back into the labs after a frantic fifteen minutes spent stopping the sanitation system from backing up.

There is also, as Rodney is quick to see and Radek is even quicker to point out, a saran-wrapped paper plate of brownies sitting on top of the pile. Teetering on top, like the last layer in a house of cards, is a note which Radek picks up and reads before Rodney can reach it. "Very intriguing," he says, peering over the top of his glasses. "It says only _Happy Birthday, Rodney_, printed in 12 point Times New Roman on standard copy paper."

"No signature?" Miko asks, pushing her own glasses back up her nose.

"No," Radek says, dimpling. "Which can mean only one thing."

"Oh, my god," Rodney says, sitting down, and his muffled groan is caused as much by the asininity of his co-workers as it is by the lingering bruises on his ass. "Can we please just get back to—"

"McKay has a secret admirer!" Radek declares, and Rodney rolls his eyes up to the heavens, just in case there's a passing Ancient who'd be willing to take pity on him and perform some much-needed workplace smiting.

"McKay," Rodney says, pouring all the scorn of which the defence of two doctoral theses has made him capable into his voice, "does _not_ have a secret admirer. What McKay _does_ have, however, is a stapler, control over allocation of departmental research resources and remarkably little patience left even factoring in that he just spent far more time than any sane person would want to crammed into a utilities pipe trying to stop the shit from _quite literally_ hitting the fan. So if we could please leave the, the junior high speculation to all the people who _don't_ have work to do, hmm? I'm sure the anthropologists have plenty of free time and they're right down the hall."

Radek rolls his eyes. "You are no fun sometimes, Rodney, you know that?"

"Please," Rodney says, "I have it on very good authority that I can be quite charming."

"What your senile grandmother told you in 1974, that doesn't count," Radek says, but Rodney can tell his heart isn't in it and he wanders off to his own desk soon afterwards.

Rodney waits until the coast is clear before opening his email client and sending a one word e-mail to jc.sheppard@lantis.mil. Inside three minutes, he gets a response to his _Thanks_—a deliberately lazy, lowercase _dunno what you're talking about mckay_ whose attempt at nonchalance is somewhat undermined by the smiley face that takes the place of John's signature.

Rodney grins and closes his email and gets down to work, sketching out a new hypothesis of his about compressed energy storage in ZPMs, mumbling to himself around a mouthful of brownie as he works. By the time he's done for the day, Rodney's scattered crumbs across his desk and there's a smear of chocolate near his hairline and he's content—because it's his birthday; because he has a cluttered, comfortable place to do good work; because the bed he's going home to is rumpled and wide and warm as a familiar body stretched out beside Rodney's own, as wide and warm as John's grin when he wakes; because some things Rodney doesn't need to hide from himself, not anymore.


End file.
